Stefanie Flippin is one of the fastest women in the world at the 100 mile distance, but she isn’t exclusively a record-setting ultra runner. She’s also a running coach, writer, co-host of the “Making Strides” podcast, and a board-certified foot and ankle surgeon, who gets as much or more satisfaction from helping others achieve their goals as she does from reaching her own.
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As a child, Stefanie enjoyed running with her father, but her own focus was on ballet, which she credits with giving her the discipline to withstand the rigors of both long distance running and medical school. “It’s one of those sports slash art forms where you really do have to do it every single day. We could say that about a lot of different sports; I mean, if you wanna get better at running, you really have to often run more. But with ballet, it’s pretty difficult to enter it at a high level later on in life; you really need to have started it pretty early on. So my schedule was really regimented for a long time, and I think there’s a lot of benefit to that. Over the years, I learned a sense of if you want to get better at something, you really do have to invest the time and energy into it.
“I had a teacher that we spent probably an hour doing strength work before we even started actually practicing and doing routines. So that physical aspect has definitely stuck with me over the years, as I transitioned more into long distance and endurance sports and running, just the importance of taking care of my body first before I actually practice the sport. But it definitely taught me resilience, as well.”
Although she excelled at ballet, Stefanie knew that she didn’t have the physical attributes of a professional dancer, and she eventually stepped away from it. “Even as a teenager, I think I had a really realistic view of the world and that, okay, ballet and dance are things that I enjoyed doing growing up and I made wonderful lifelong friends as a result. I took a lot of lessons from that journey, but at the same time, I think I felt that I had a larger calling. I know it sounds kind of ridiculous, but, ‘How can I utilize this skill set to change the world? I think I can take some of those lessons and apply them to some of my other interests.’”
Those other interests included medicine, and it was while she was in medical school that Stefanie started running more. “I just decided that I needed something totally different from these long hours of studying, being in the anatomy lab. And I decided that, ‘Okay, running’s gonna be that thing for me.’ But running was not ever a competitive or an elite consideration for me for a long time because I legitimately didn’t have the bandwidth to prioritize it in that way.”
Once she finished her residency though, and had more free time, her running improved drastically. “People would ask me, ‘It’s crazy; what happened this year? Your results got so much better.’ I was just no longer working in the hospital like 90 hours per week.”
Remarkably, Stefanie had managed to stay injury-free through years of ballet and later, 100-mile weeks of running. 2022, though, was a perfect storm of events. Her mother’s best friend, who was a second mother to her, passed away after battling cancer, and as physicians with a private practice, she and her husband had dealt with many stressors during the COVID pandemic.
“I really was just dealing with the stress by training as much and as hard as I could through it,” Stefanie says. “And that ultimately led to having my first bone stress injury” [of the lesser trochanter and medial femoral neck.] It definitely could have been a more significant injury, but it was difficult to cross-train through. It was coming at the exact, just worst time, as I processed the biggest loss that I’d ever experienced as an adult. And so I definitely had to come to grips with the fact that I could not run my way or train my way through things anymore, after utilizing it as such a positive stress outlet for so long.”
To make matters worse, she had just been signed by Lululemon to take part in the FURTHER ultramarathon in March 2024, which added to the sense of shame that often accompanies a bone stress injury, “We have so much more data on them now and some of the best papers out there underscore this is an injury of training errors, nutrition. So it’s hard not to take it personally. I really had to process that; I just felt so shameful about it.
“And I also felt shameful having to share with a brand who was bringing me on, saying, ‘Yes’ to something that in my mind and as a physician, I know how long it takes bone to heal. I know I’ll be able to build back, certainly in time for this, but it was hard because I felt like there were a lot of unknowns, including feeling like maybe I’m not the right person for this; you’re bringing me on and I can’t even run right now.
“So working through that, and then, grief really doesn’t have an ending, ever. You just learn how to live with it, and you learn how to shape your life around it, but it never goes away. Since the end of 2022, I’ve had highs; I’ve also had continued lows as well, after having a pretty severe bout of COVID this past fall, at the end of 2023. So I’ve just been sort of weathering those as I go, and doing my best to take things one day at a time in stride.”
Stefanie ran as part of the FURTHER team, but not in the way that she had hoped initially. Still, as her friend and podcast co-host, Carolyn Su, wrote, “While Stef may have had to set aside and reframe her original goals for this race, she’s embodied and represented the true spirit of what it means to celebrate women and to build longevity in the sport.”
She paced and encouraged the other runners, which, she says, “really tapped into everything that I love about being a coach, but also everything that I love about being a practitioner, as well. It really was such a positive experience for me because the night before and even the morning of, was super emotional. So the whole experience at FURTHER was grounding for me and a big reminder of my ‘why.’
“This sport is not a solo sport, ever. I’ve had to hold on to nuggets along the way just to keep myself moving forward and at the pace that I want to be going at. But FURTHER was definitely a reminder of that aspect of the sport for me. And I think coming out of FURTHER, I’ve also had to work through the fact that you don’t have to hold your breath all the time. You are durable; you are resilient. These things that have happened to you, they’ve had reasons why, and some of them have just been really ill -timed, but there’s a reason why they happen. And it’s not something that I have to just keep looking back on and being frustrated with myself and being like, ‘Why can’t you perform? Why can’t you just stay healthy?’ Sometimes shit just happens, you know? It’s not that deep sometimes. So I think those are the lessons and things I’ve taken since FURTHER.”
Resources:
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